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16 ft new wood runabout4/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() For our new boats, after about four years you sand it and refinish it, and it’s good for another five to seven years.” “It looks classic, but it’s built with modern materials and methods,” Bloem said of their finished products. They have a number of others, most over 30 feet in length, but they also offer the 14-foot ElliYacht and the 17-foot Riverboat. The Rivelles is their most popular model. Each boat takes about half a year to build. “It’s great to be home in Coeur d’Alene, providing jobs,” Bloem shared. Their entire focus today is building modern boats out of wood. In 2003, when Bloem and his wife were starting their family, they moved back to Coeur d’Alene, and he joined StanCraft. He got back into the wooden boat business, mostly doing reconstructions, but also building between 30 and 40 spec boats by the late 1990s. “Syd says On Golden Pond (1981) started the resurgence of wood boats,” Bloem said of his father-in-law, Syd Young. Around the same time, a cultural phenomenon changed his company’s trajectory – specifically, a movie. “Wood was passé.” In the early 1980s, Syd and his family moved the business to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “From 1968 to the mid-‘80s, they built fiberglass boats,” explained Bloem. Stanley Young’s son Syd took over the business in 1968, and promptly moved into fiberglass construction. They were regional builders, and they created some classics – most notably the 1945 22-foot Torpedo. “That was back when wood boats were just boats,” joked Bloem. “Billy” Young and his son Stanley (Bloem’s wife Amy’s great-grandfather and grandfather) in Lakeside, Montana. It was originally founded in 1933 by W.H. “We like to joke that we’re a 16-year-old 86-year-old company,” said Robb Bloem, the company’s owner. The first one my search turned up was StanCraft Boats, of Hayden, Idaho. There aren’t nearly so many anymore, but there are builders still out there. There were many others – Stanley, Hutchinson, Elco, Century, Shepherd, Fay & Bowen, Riva, Gar Wood, and so on.Ī StanCraft interior Image courtesy StanCraft Boats Today’s wooden boat builders But his company slowly faded away after he died. Andrew Jackson Higgins was a businessman hero of WWII, who invented the LCVP landing craft (“Higgins boat”) and built PT boats too, then transitioned to wooden pleasure craft in the postwar years. But he transitioned to fiberglass and eventually founded Tiara Yachts, where he remains Chairman of the Board. Leon Slikkers was a Chris-Craft employee in Holland, Michigan, who went out on his own and built SlickCraft wooden boats in the 1950s and 1960s. The company has changed hands a number of times, and has been owned by Winnebago since last year. But in 1971 they built their last mahogany boat, and they’ve made only fiberglass boats since. The name changed in the 1920s, and Chris-Craft built about a quarter million boats over the years, growing to ten plants and over 5,000 employees by the end of the 1950s. He formed the Smith Ryan Boat Company in 1910 and began building runabouts for the masses. Their founder, Christopher Columbus Smith, built the first one just nine years after the Civil War ended. Chris-Craft was the biggest, the true mass producer of mahogany powerboats. ![]()
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